Opening Night for the Music Director

Tonight is opening night.  This is absolutely blowing my mind.

The seed for Hack, Punt, Tool was planted exactly one year and four days ago, after MTG’s Jekyll and Hyde Matinee.  This year has been an absolute roller coaster for me.   I think anyone who was around me last spring (final semester before graduation) knew how stressed out I was between two theses, a senior capstone project, being President of RoboCup, alto section leader in Concert Choir and writing a musical.  As stressful as it was, I wouldn’t trade the semester for anything because the foundation of Hack, Punt, Tool came out of it.  The stability of our weekly meetings got shaken during the summer as graduation, summer plans, and real world jobs got in the way.  I was afraid that as a writing team, not being in the same state would slowly eat away at us and the project would die.  Thanks to a large number of car trips from Connecticut to Boston, and an even larger number of Skype calls, we made it happen, and here it is, opening night of the show.

In the past year, I’ve realized that the one thing I love to do more than anything in the world is to create things, whether it’s building a robot, doing graphic design, carving a pumpkin, or writing a musical.  It’s so rewarding to me to be able to work diligently and passionately on a project and step back and feel proud of the work accomplished.  This experience to me has been the epitome of that.  I never knew that I could feel as passionate about any project as I do about Hack, Punt, Tool.  I think the best part though is knowing that all those days working so hard on my own on music, I could come to our meetings with something new, and share it with others who were as passionate about the show as I was.  There were so many late nights of discussing, arguing, laughing, listening to cast albums, getting angry over the word “scoff,” recording demo songs, doing readings of the script, watching Vitas on YouTube, seeing crazy sci-fi shows together at ART, and generally being silly.  The way we all worked together was truly amazing, and I’ll miss our writing sessions immensely.

Watching it come together over the past month has also been incredible.  Living in Connecticut, I wasn’t able to come to rehearsal every night, but each rehearsal I came to, more and more of the show came together.  The characters were coming alive in front of us, and the music was no longer confined to the page.   I’m grateful that I’ve been able to be a part of the production process to help shepherd the project into a state ready to be seen by an audience.

This project is so dear to us, and it means so much to us that people are coming to see the show because we’ve poured so much of our time, energy, hearts, and souls into making it what it is.  We hope you enjoy it, and you should tell all your friends to come see Hack, Punt, Tool!

-Julie Henion ’11 (Music Director, Composer)